Entrepreneur Lou Montulli explains that the "cookies", which he created in 1994 when he was an engineer at Netscape, were designed with the idea of ​​making the Internet work easier by allowing sites to memorize visits.

"My invention is at the center of online advertising strategies, but that was not the goal," he pleads.

"It's just a core technology that makes the web work."

"Cookies" are files through which a site can recognize a specific browser.

They make possible operations such as the automatic opening of sessions, the publication of comments or the addition of articles in an online shopping cart, underlines Mr. Montulli.

Without the so-called internal cookies (“first-party cookies”, in English), used by sites to interact with Internet users and memorize certain data, each visit would be considered the first.

For Mr. Montulli, the real culprits are third-party cookies, created by external sites and integrated into browsers and advertising agencies on the Internet.

"It is only thanks to the collusion between many sites and an advertising network that targeted advertising is possible", he explains.

The sites share data on the habits and preferences of Internet users with advertising agencies, which then use them for targeting.

“If you do a search for a niche product that is a little weird and you find yourself bombarded with ads for this product on different sites, it is a strange experience”, recognizes the engineer.

"It's natural to think that if people know that I'm looking for blue suede shoes, that must mean that everyone knows everything about me, and therefore wants to get out of this system."

If a site collects personal information, such as a name or an email address, it is possible that this data leaks and that a browser is found associated with a person.

"It's a network effect through which all these different sites are in cahoots with advertising tracking tools," summarizes Mr. Montulli.

Technological arms race

Like other technology groups, Google, which derives most of its revenue from advertising, presented this week a new project to block third-party "cookies".

An announcement made shortly after a fine of 150 million euros imposed by the Cnil, guardian of the privacy of the French, to Google, for its policy on "cookies".

Facebook, for its part, was fined 60 million euros.

Mr. Montulli would like to point out that many free services on the internet, such as a Google search, are actually paid for by online advertising.

One option would be to discontinue ad targeting and replace it with paid subscriptions.

Montulli has nothing against phasing out third-party "cookies," but warns that eliminating these files altogether would lead advertisers to resort to more devious advertising strategies.

“Advertising will find a solution,” he predicts.

"It will become a technology arms race given the billions of dollars at stake, and the advertising industry will do what is necessary to keep the ship afloat."

The deletion of third-party cookies, and therefore of targeted advertising, could also penalize the most modest sites by depriving them of their main source of income while strengthening giants like Apple, Google or Meta, the parent company of Facebook.

For Mr. Montulli, the only viable long-term solution is probably a regulation that would maintain "cookies" while introducing control tools, such as the ability to accept or refuse data sharing.

"The Web would be really unusable without cookies," he says.

"But we will have to evolve the way they are used by advertisers."

© 2022 AFP